Let me tell you a story that changed my life forever.
It’s a story related to a plant.
Not just any plant,
the pineapple plant.
But let me start from the beginning.
I was born in Asturias, in a tiny village called Salas,
and my family has carried out a very traditional trade.
Since 1885, they run a clock making and jewelry company.
I was raised in a very traditional environment.
That’s me at 10 months.
A nice shot.
I show it because I’m wearing a little angora cardigan
and all the rest is made of cotton.
Good quality, no blend whatsoever.
And those clothes would afterwards belong to my sisters.
So it also had to last.
I’m the older of four siblings
and I was always a rebel.
My dad would say:
“María del Carmen, you are a chamois.”
You may not understand “chamois”
but in Asturias it meant “you are a rebel,
you don’t listen, we can’t do anything with you.”
I think they were right, I was difficult.
At 19, I left Spain for Ireland,
where my home is nowadays.
I went to Ireland to learn English, I always wanted to travel.
I had to work and study, of course.
I worked in all I could:
as a babysitter, cleaning hospitals, in restaurants —
That is the way I still do things.
Studying for work
and working for studying.
After a couple years in Ireland I started my first company.
I am now in my fifth company.
Not all of them succeeded.
At the beginning we were two people with 30 Irish pounds,
making small leather products.
We sold in markets, and started making a little more.
After a few years we were 30 people
making a high quality luxury product,
with the best leathers we could find
and selling in the best stores.
After working on this for 15 years
I was asked to be a consultant
for the World Bank, European Union —
in Asia, South America, the Caribbean… many countries.
One of these countries was Colombia.
I worked for a company,
for me it was a big one, with around 500 employees,
designing a better product with better quality.
I was at the production site, with workers from the factory.
There were many women, and I asked them:
Where do you come from? – From the countryside.
And where are your families? – They are in the countryside.
And your children? – They are with their grandparents.
I was surprised, I had a little baby at the time.
And why is that?
– Because we don’t make enough to keep them with us.
And when do you see them?
– Maybe once a month, or maybe less.
This didn’t happen just once.
It happened in the East, the West,
in many places where I worked.
I started wondering: what am I doing.
I make a luxury product, an export item,
helping out all these factories.
But who am I really helping, in a way?
It really moved me.
As a mother, as a human being.
It made me start thinking in a different way.
I also went to the Philippines.
I had to do the same thing,
help making a better leather export product.
I started working at the Design Center of the Philippines,
but I was already thinking differently, I thought:
I need to know what is that I work with, where does this product come from
and what kind of people are behind the materials I am going to use.
I visited the place where the leather is made.
What I saw completely changed
my way of thinking about the product I was using.
Leather making is one of the worst ecological and social disasters
of all our production.
After oil and fabrics comes the leather.
That’s when I decided to stop using leather.
Just imagine, I was the leather expert, I had no backup plan.
My dad would have said: “What are you doing, what a chamois,
what are you going to do with your life now.
I did not know what I was going to do.
But I did decide not to use it anymore and look around.
I started exploring the country’s resources.
Every time I travel to a country
I check out what’s in the country.
But let me tell you about these leathers.
We are at a slaughterhouse, interesting, right?
This is a picture of a slaughterhouse,
a place where skin is tanned, in India.
200 million cattle are slaughtered every year
from a global herd of 1.5 billions,
only cows.
Only in the European Union
we are 500 million people.
In the Amazonas there is a herd of 200 million,
causing the 15 percent of world deforestation.
It is mind blowing.
In many of these tanneries,
mostly in the East, Bangladesh, Pakistan,
workers’ life expectancy is 50 years.
I would be death by now.
This is what we ought to think about.
I started working in a complete different way.
Using natural fibers,
with the people working with them.
I didn’t know anything about them, they had to teach me.
Weavers, crafters, researchers, scientists, chemists —
and people who grow these fibers.
I worked with indigenous people on how to obtain natural dyes.
All these experiences, this work
led me to understand what design means
in a complete different manner.
For me, design is a very powerful transformation tool,
a tool for bringing people, ecology and economy together.
Something solid can come out of this union,
that can help the world.
After all these years working with fibers,
after nine years devoted to work, research, going back and forward,
I always thought:
How can I find something so I don’t use this material?
I found out that pineapple leaves’ fiber is really thin,
but has a great tensile strength and a high flexibility.
It is truly special.
I thought: This is what I need to make a mesh,
a kind of fiber mix, like our skin.
That’s what led me to create a “non-fabric”
now called Piñatex.
Piñatex is made out of a fiber
considered waste of the pineapple production.
But we know for sure there is no such thing as waste.
What we consider waste of one thing can be used for something else.
When we develop a new product,
because this is a new one in the world, I invented it,
we need to create the production chain, which didn’t exist either.
What we did, and still do, is to work with farmers,
cooperatives in the Philippines,
This people have now a new job extracting these fibers
from something that was worthless for them before.
They are making much more money out of this than growing pineapple,
because it takes 14 months to grow a pineapple.
Then we worked with companies to create a brand new fabric
then comes to Spain by boat
to two companies in the outskirts of Barcelona
that complete the lining, which is the magic of Piñatex.
This is what is called a circular economy,
cycling a process and a material
so it keeps adding value.
To put it in perspective,
pineapple is the second most popular fruit in the world.
This world production generates 25 million tons of rubbish,
waste that stays there.
In the Philippines, the third world producer of pineapple,
hypothetically, if we use all the leaves, all the fibers,
we could produce 180 million square meters of Piñatex, this new material.
That’s how I look at it, it has to be something big
to balance out the huge volume of other products.
What does this product represent?
When we make a product I think we need to realize
if through innovation and research
we can use something that had no value before, a waste,
and add value to it.
Make this raise its economic and social value
and be responsible for all this process.
I think this value should not rest,
but add socially, ecologically and economically too.
We need to think like creators, it’s not just a final product,
it’s like the tail of a comet, what’s going on at the end of the product.
We need to think through here.
As consumers we all need to use clothes, t-shirts, shoes —
We also need to think, not be oblivious to what’s going on.
We need to reflect: “Do I really need another pair of shoes?”
Another t-shirt?
And if we do, what is in this product?
We can check: Is it made of cotton?
Where does this cotton come from?
What happens in the process?
Where does my money go?,
like we said before.
Does my money go to the beginning,
to make an extraordinary campaign to communicate “this is the product,”
or does it go to the end, to the people who produce it.
It is us who need to think and be responsible
as human beings.
I want to leave you with a quote, a meaningful one for me.
Plutarch, a philosopher and poet.
Written more than a thousand years ago, I think it still keeps the same meaning.
All this journey, this period I’ve been describing,
it has been about internal changes, previous to the external ones.
But this internal changes have led to transform a little this reality
in front of us.
This is what I carry with me.
The future of my job is to keep looking for new materials,
new collaborations, innovations, products, markets —
But the principle is to think on my own responsibility
towards the people and the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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